Posted
by
timothy
on Friday January 22, 2010 @12:43AM
from the how-about-set-top-boxes dept.

bonch writes "Following in YouTube's footsteps, Vimeo has now introduced its own beta HTML5 video player, and like YouTube, it uses H.264 and requires Safari, Chrome, or ChromeFrame. The new player doesn't suffer the rebuffering problems of the Flash version when clicking around in the video's timeline, and it also loads faster. HTML5 could finally be gaining some real momentum."

I'm a total GNU fanboy most days, and generally agree with the moral move they are trying to make with OOG formats, but in this case it is a losing strategy. H264 video has gotten a momentum that is hard to break, similar to how MP3 got a momentum in the past. It has nothing to do with technical features, morals, licensing, or other commonly-argued things. Instead, it's about a critical-mass of popularity. H264 video the new pop thing, even in cases where people don't even know terms like "H264".

By not finding a way to make video work properly, Firefox is saying they want to be left behind. No, I highly doubt people like google or others will re-encode video into Theora. They will make the business decision that not only is it a lot of work, it's not necessary as firefox is supported with Flash.

If the Firefox people want to make a good moral stand with this issue, they should pull something similar to the crypto situation and make an "international" version. That version could serve as an embarrassment to the restrictive patent system, and a useful political talking point. At a minimum, though, they should simply remove all codec processing form the project, leaving that particular can of worms to an external project (gstreamer? embed mplayer/vlc/other? some new project created specifically for this purpose?).

I love firefox. I really do. So please don't choose to be non-player in the video arena!

This is a big thing for me. I don't give a damn about their ideology or their patent concerns, if youtube choose h264 then h264 has won this mini format war, and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.

If they don't, i'll end up on chrome for windows, and I already use Safari on mac because their mac UI team are atrocious.

Honestly, as much as I'd like to stop using Flash immediately, I'd rather have Mozilla try to stick this out. Somewhere around a third of all people on the internet use Firefox (and I assume a higher number of Youtube users). If Mozilla can push Google to support Theora it will be worth the wait.

Using Theora for new videos doesn't seem like such a big deal though. The article says that Vimeo's new HTML5 stuff doesn't work on 35% of their videos. I assume that has something to do with the encoding. The problem is that if we just accept the formats that require thousands of dollars for licensing, we'll never get to use free ones. Unless they're forced to (by a company like Google), Microsoft and Apple will never support a free format, because they can easily afford the licensing fees and they know that Mozilla can't.

Google has no incentive to go theora either, as it means transcoding all their stuff - and they clearly already have a h.264 license anyway.

The authoring tools for.ogg are not there either.

So really, open source people can whine all they want, it will make no difference - Firefox can buy a license, or they can become irrelevant. Or maybe start their own video hosting to compete, but my bet is that will be more expensive than a h.264 license.

Or hell, they can just use whatever codecs are available on the host platform.... and get back to what they should be worried about - writing a web browser, rather than getting involved in a codec war they have no chance winning

This will of course benefit ChromeOS and will force Microsoft into implementing html5 and H264 negating its strategy of killing adobe and becoming king of the online video.

But there is a bad smell about this. Google could achieve this as well by adding Theora to the supported codecs. Google is putting Firefox in a position where it is either encumbered with patents therefore losing the status of "pure" open source project, or looking bad in the feature front. I don't like this.

Also, Ogg Theora is just less good than h264 on several levels. For one thing, there are hardware decoders for h264, but more importantly for me, h264 just indisputably looks better. Seriously, in this grudge match of Firefox v. Google (and now others), Firefox is on the losing side. I hope the developers realize this soon. Maybe Google is not intervening because they're happy to let people say "fuck it, I guess I'll try it with Chrome" - as I'm about to.

I agree 100%. Mathematical algorithm patents are not recognized in most countries outside the US, so make an international Firefox version that only visitors who claim to be outside the US can download.

Look, ditching h.264 is simply not going to happen. there are way too many hardware devices out there that do h.264 and no ogg. All I'm hearing is bitching from the firefox camp about how they're not going to support it for reason X rather than looking for a solution to the problem.

Simply not supporting h.264 is an option, sure. I just don't think its going to end well for firefox.

AS to host code not being exposed to the web... run it with least privilege in a sandbox. My bet is that any copy of theora embedded into the browser is exactly the same reference code as used else where in any case (and if its, not, then its not as well tested...), so that point is pretty moot.

The web is supposed to be open, if we kowtow to patent encumbered formats just because Google says so, then I'm afraid the last 10 years we have spent trying to get up from under Microsoft and the browser wars would have been a complete waste.

We're basically going to head back to "This site is best viewed by X or Y", only with different values for X and Y.

The reason a "plug-in" solution is redundant stems from the fact that you can already serve H.264 content using plug-ins _today_. The whole point of the <video> tag was to standardize and open up the mess video has become (Flash, Quicktime, WMP, Silver light, etc.).

If you shun browser makers (and content producers) with patent encumbered formats, then you might as well call Flash a standard and be done with it.

It amazes me that the general sentiment against MS's closed-"open" office formats was highly negative (which was well deserved), but when Google basically says F-U to What-wg and does whatever it wants anyway with a patent encumbered format then Firefox is at fault for not paying for royalties.

The day YouTube moves to HTML5 and only serves H.264 content (which will not happen any time soon, thanks IE) is the last day I'll visit that site. Thanks, but no thanks, I'm not going back to the dark ages of the web to watch a dog skate-board.

And a majority of that third live outside the jurisdiction of the US patent system so the license issue becomes moot. Personally I'd rather the rest of the world stick 2 fingers up at the US system and continue to use browsers that support H.264 and don't pay any patent licenses to anyone.

For example, why not make a US and non-US version of Firefox with the non-US version having H.264 support. US people will still manage to get the working version and Firefox will still have the required support.

the free exchange of ideas is the only thing underpinning any sense of philosophical integrity in modern liberal democracy. besides, you basically lie when you say its expensive to develop this stuff. a university professional could do this, and by publishing it, for free (in an ideal world) he cements his academic credentials, which is the only reward anyone deserves for the advancement of ideas

capitalizing on those ideas is a secondary game that does not overlap, and should not overlap (in an ideal world) with the primary game of development of better ideas

PNG was easy. Want alpha channels? Use PNG. Want better compression? Use PNG. Want more than 256 colours? Use PNG. Oh, and by the way, it's royalty free so you won't get hit by those fees that everyone's starting to have to pay for producing or reading GIFs.

Theora is hard. Want good quality? Use H.264. Want multiple implementations optimised for different profiles? Use H.264. Want hardware accelerated playback on mobile devices? Use H.264. Oh, and there's a small license fee that you'll have to pay if you live somewhere with software patents.

VC-2 is a bit easier to sell. Similar quality to H.264, lossless profile, hardware acceleration close to market, royalty free. Even then it's not quite clear that it's superior because you can play back reasonable quality H.264 on a much lower-spec'd machine and the current generation of handhelds all come with H.264 decoding (and, in some cases, encoding) hardware, not VC-2 hardware.

Mozilla would have to add a closed-source component to Firefox for it to be able to work.

Or they could hook into each OS's native codec libraries -- IIRC windows 7 supports h264 out of the box, and most linux distros have a gstreamer-x264 or whatever package easily available ("easy" as in "will prompt to be installed the first time it's required", in ubuntu's case at least)

Tough luck for them. I't won't be long for a fork to appear that includes the H.264 codec - possibly released by Canonical or other interested party . The US seems to be rapidly heading towards some kind of lawsuit singularity which it needs to pull back from or simply disappear.

several European countries appear to recognize patents on H.264 and AAC as well.

Because HTML5 + VIDEO tag draws people away *from Flash* and *into an open standard* that can be found everywhere.What Microsoft would have liked would be, drawing people away from Flash and *into one of their own proprietary* technology, marketed as much better.

The core strategy of Microsoft is not just killing random IT companies for the fun of it (although it's not always obvious), but killing other companies in order to get bigger themselves in the process.

Silverlight is their optimal solution to lock more customer in Microsoft solutions.HTML5 is their nightmare.

Because HTML5 + VIDEO tag draws people away *from Flash* and *into an open standard* that can be found everywhere.

H264 is not an open standard. The video tag is just another lock-in, masquerading as an easy to use core feature.

It's all moot anyway. Without agreement on a codec, the video tag is dead in the water anyway. Lack of a common standard means that the video tag essentially equates to what we already have; the ability to "embed" video which may or may not play in the users browser. Google and Apple killed proper web video because they put their other business interests before giving web users the tag they really wanted. They're not browser companies after all.